Announcement - RSVP to attend Blue Waters presentation

Announcement - RSVP to attend Blue Waters presentation

Robert Wilhelmson, pictured above, will present on the Blue Waters supercomputer on 18 May 2010 at Argonne. Image courtesy of Robert Wilhelmson.

The Computation Institute is now accepting RSVPs for an 18 May presentation about the Blue Waters petascale computer.

Blue Waters is likely to be the most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The Blue Waters project includes NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM, NSF, and the Great Lakes Consortium, of which the University of Chicago and Argonne are members.

Robert Wilhelmson, chief scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and professor of atmospheric sciences at UIUC, will be giving the presentation. Wilhelmson will provide an overview of the Blue Waters project and its purposes along with some of the challenges that must be overcome to enable applications to efficiently make use of the more than 200,000 cores that will be available. Access to the system to carry out frontier research will be presented along with an overview of research and development opportunities related to sustained petascale computing.

Wilhelmson was one of the original founders of NCSA in 1985. He holds a BSc degree from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois (1966) and a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois (1972). He is known for his work in studying severe storms and for his work with the visualization team at NCSA in creating animations of storm and tornado evolution that have been widely seen in IMAX and NOVA productions. One of the earlier animations paving the way for scientific visualization of model data was nominated for an Academy Award in the animation category. Wilhelmson serves on the Blue Waters Technical Advisory Committee with an emphasis on applications. In addition, he will be a future user of Blue Waters, studying the formation, evolution, and decay of tornadoes that form in supercell storms.